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I am not an expert on railway safety but presumably there is some tolerance for these gaps, below which changes are not concerning. I am not sure 1/8 of an inch is the correct number but there is some correct number. It makes sense to me that the process for inspection incorporates these tolerances. In this specific context Bell is contesting his being fired. In which case whether he was doing the thing he was trained to do is relevant. "I was following the procedure my employer trained me to do" is, to my mind, a pretty good defense against "this employee acted negligently in their role." Or, at least, it shifts any negligence off the employee to the employer.
Is it a bad thing, though? How much are these gaps expected to change naturally? What is the inter-inspector accuracy? I do not have the domain knowledge to answer these questions but it seems plausible to me the mentioned 1/8 inch is a tolerance below which variation is not worth worrying about.
Relevantly, 1/8 inch is the threshold below which it becomes very difficult to measure without specialized equipment. If these guys are measuring stuff with tape measures ordinary human error would make a ridiculous number of changes to the logs.
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Changes are essentially summed vectors. 1/8" or less of a change from month to month is almost never going to be a problem. 10 of those negligible movements in a row, in the same direction, is a massive problem! But if you didn't update the documented measurement, because each time you checked, it had changed 1/8" or less, you would never even know that your position had drifted by an entire inch from your documentation. The only non-negligent way I can think of to track the sum of many small vectors is to record the actual measurement every time.
But ten of those movements would be noted, because they weren't updating the logs when it moved 1/16 inch.
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I am making some assumptions about the procedure I suppose. I'm imagining they measure a gap of some size, 1" say, and that's what they record. Then, on subsequent inspections, if the gap measures less than 1-1/8" they just leave the measurement at 1". So not updating the measurement over months and years implies a net change less than 1/8". If they reset the baseline they are measuring the gap against on subsequent measurements then I agree that is a huge problem.
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If the measurement is supposed to be 56 1/2", and you measure it and it turns out to be 56 17/32", and then the next time you measure it it's 56 19/32", and then 56 21/32", then you'll now note that 56 21/32" is more than 1/8" from the nominal 56 1/2", and you'll record that. It's only if
You DO record the measurement each time and
You compare against the previous measurement, not the nominal correct value
that creep will get you.
True - I was assuming for some reason they were only recording deltas but it's hard to imagine there wouldn't be some measurement against a baseline. ETA: I guess if that's the case, then I don't understand how it would be possible to disregard measurements under the "less than 1/8 inch" policy and have them end up moving to the point of failure, unless through complete dereliction.
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